Marketing Compactors

Detail. “Hotpoint Trash Compactor.” Reading Eagle, December 15, 1974.

Detail. “GE Factory Bargain Days.” Boca Raton News, October 31, 1971.

The primary line of marketing that Whirlpool, KitchenAid, and other manufacturers and promoters of trash compactors used to encourage purchases relied on creating distance from the dirt and uncleanliness of conventional garbage bins. “The elimination of garbage is a dirty job and the compactor is the clean, easy and convenient way to get rid of it,” quipped one advocate in 1979. Suggesting the necessity of an electric technology to eliminate filth from the house is entirely consistent with the trajectory of other promotions for household appliances of the twentieth century: the clothes washer, self-cleaning oven, the garbage disposer, etc.

Gallager, Sheldon M. “Handy New Compactors Put the Squeeze on Trash.” Popular Mechanics, June 1972.

As in most discussions of domestic cleanliness, a division of labor based on gender played an important role: “Give her the key to a cleaner kitchen and an end to messy, smelly, garbage cans.” Here, the husband and provider has implicit responsibility for refuse, while his wife in maintains a pristine kitchen–and both sides gain from compactor use. Indeed, the trash compactor may have served to physically reinforce these roles because of the weight of compacted trash; the Atlanta study noted in the majority of households, men took out the trash, while women replaced the bag – the sanitary half of the job. Print advertisements invariably showed women filling, but rarely emptying the compactor, modeling these practices for consumers.